Westcoast

Westcoast Ltd is the number one UK distributor for many leading IT brands, such as HP, Microsoft, Lenovo, and Apple. Established in 1984, they now employ more than 1,200 people across a number of locations in the UK, Ireland and Europe, and are consistently ranked in the Sunday Times Top Track of the 100 Largest Privately-owned UK Companies.

THE BRIEF

Westcoast needed to provide integrated marketing support to Microsoft, demonstrating that they could work to improve sales of the Surface product range further down the channel via their own customers (resellers and retailers). Central to this was an online facility that would give Westcoast’s customers some great tools to promote and sell the products more efficiently, primarily by enabling them to educate their own customers, and showcasing all the benefits of purchasing Microsoft Surface products. Given the breadth of the product range and vast scope of the industry sectors served, it was crucial that the site was easy to navigate and engaging enough to nudge the user through all the rich content to find what best suited their business, and ultimately make a purchase decision.

THE ANSWER

The first thing we did was assemble a ‘Taskforce’ of resellers from a broad range of criteria, before conducting two batches of telephone interviews to help us really get into the mindset of our audience and to understand their needs. This was vital to ensure the site worked as hard as possible and met its ultimate objective of enabling the resellers to sell more efficiently, accurately and confidently. We were also all ears to their honest opinions on the Microsoft Surface products, their past experience of selling the products, and any obstacles they may have encountered.

This gave us the vital information with which to go to work. We built a website centred around stories. Entitled ‘Surface Stories’, at its heart were four online interactive stories that each sold a whole concept for a separate Surface product (Surface Book 2, Surface Pro, Surface Laptop and Surface Studio).

The first thing we did was assemble a ‘Taskforce’ of resellers from a broad range of criteria, before conducting two batches of telephone interviews to help us really get into the mindset of our audience and to understand their needs.

“Wireframes ensure that each page has a purpose, achieves the goals set out in the client brief and define a logical navigation for your website.”

The first thing that engages the eye when landing on the homepage is an animation whose style is evocative of an illustrated book, and which playfully demonstrates each of the four product’s main key features.

On the first page of every story the animations are developed further, coming to life and jumping off the page, while the headline font and a right to left page swipe helps embellish the rich story-telling theme. Reviews (testimonials), integral to all stories, are given a central prominence, and a circular ‘loading’ wheel, placed around the story number, gives a visual guide to the viewer for charting their progress through a story, giving them feedback throughout. Yet navigation and function were just as vital as the engaging content.

The website is exceptionally easy to navigate; gently and effortlessly nudging Westcoast’s customers to read and absorb the entire site. From any part of the website, you are only two clicks away from any piece of content, be it testimonials, product videos, downloadable pitch templates, and case studies.

THE RESULTS

The final website undoubtedly provided Westcoast with an engaging and centralised library of valuable sales pitch assets that could be effortlessly accessed by their clients, but don’t take our word for it. Here are a few words from Westcoast...

“ Gasp have been a pleasure to work with. From the start of the project up until the end they have ensured that every single one of our requirements were met. They have delivered a brilliant site that has been really well received by our partners. We are already exploring how Gasp can help us with future projects.